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Psychology in UX

You walk into your first yoga class. You’re a little insecure about your weight and how your yoga clothes cling to your body revealing every flaw. You’re nervous about making a fool of yourself. Your eyes instantly zoom onto the fit model-esque people chatting in the corner. As you walk past them, your ears pick up the tinkle of laughter. My god, are they laughing at me?

There’s a darn good reason that there are so many PSYCHOLOGY+UX articles floating around. User experience design has its conceptual roots in cognitive and behavioral psychology. Even though you no longer need to be a psychologist to be a user researcher, if you’ve arrived at a UX career through a path in visual design, you might be missing out on some core psychology knowledge to help you make better design decisions. Let’s start with a brief background more...

Human Cognition

There’s no lack of data to suggest how visual-oriented we are as humans.
For instance, “90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000x faster in the brain than text." Or this: “65 percent of people are visual learners, and one of the best ways to drive messages home is through visual content.” This data helps explain why visual marketing has really exploded recently, and visual-centric content such as infographics are so popular. Seeing is one of our primary senses by which we intake information and understand the world. Basically, it’s a big deal. So it only makes sense that effective website design is done with visual perception in mind...

Design can benefit immensely from cognitive bias.
Specifically, design can benefit from thinking of cognitive biases as keys to efficiency and accuracy, rather than as roadblocks in the way. Dark patterns prey on the way we think to meet more nefarious ends — but what if, instead, we used the way we naturally think to design better interactions and experiences? Cognitive bias helps us to better understand our world and act accordingly — quickly. It’s important to understand exactly how this works, so that we can design for and with it rather than against or in spite of it. Cognitive bias should be a powerful tool in the designer’s belt.

Conversational UI

You may have heard that “conversational interfaces” are the new hot trend in digital product design. Industry leaders such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are strongly focussed on building a new generation of conversational interfaces. Several trends are contributing to this phenomenon—artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies are progressing rapidly—but the main reason why conversational interfaces become so important is pretty obvious: Chatting is natural for us since we primarily interact with each other through conversation.

Books and Resources 📖

We were recently lucky to host James Buckhouse, Founder of the Sequoia Creative Lab, on our podcast for an in-depth discussion about the role of story in experience design. James comes at this from a unique angle. He spent nearly a decade as an animator at Dreamworks, working on blockbusters like the “Shrek” franchise, before becoming a senior experience architect at Twitter. Today, storytelling is the foundation of the work he does at Sequoia, where he helps portfolio companies create better experiences for their own users.

Gestalt Theory

The fundamental law that governs the Gestalt Principles is that we tend to order our experience in a manner that’s regular, orderly, and recognizable. This is what allows us to create meaning in a complex and chaotic world. And having a solid understanding of how these principles work will help you in three ways.
- They’ll help you determine which design elements are most effective in a given situation. For example, when to use visual hierarchy, background shading, gradients, and how to group similar items and distinguish different ones.
- These psychological principles hold the power to influence our visual perception, which allows designers to direct our attention to specific points of focus, get us to take specific actions, and create behavioral change.
- And finally, at the highest level, the Gestalt Principles help you design products that solve the customer’s problem or meet the user’s need in a way that’s beautiful, pleasing, and intuitive to use.